


One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

by bythegrace



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Friendship/Love, jealous jemma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-18 11:28:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5926780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bythegrace/pseuds/bythegrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fitz saves non-Maveth Will, he and Jemma deal with the aftermath the only way they know how- avoidance, angst and pain. That is until Fitz meets someone who helps him heal, if only just a bit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1:

The discovery that Will was likely left on the planet courtesy of Hydra lends a special urgency to his retrieval. As the days wear on, Jemma becomes consumed by an almost preternatural desire to see him rescued, precluding any further talk of feelings between her and Fitz. 

Her actions and her silence answer Fitz’s unspoken question- despite their kiss she of course still chooses Will- the man she loves. 

So Fitz steps aside the moment he returns with a dust covered, shell shocked space boyfriend half slung over his shoulder. The moment he returns Fitz locks eyes with Jemma; her face a symphony of fear, hope, love, and concern. The moment he captures her gaze he has a fleeting, irrational hope that she run into his arms and embrace him. Fitz feels his heart hammer in his chest and a voice in his head reminds him that this is their last chance, the very last, the moment everything will be decided. She hesitates, her eyes darting between the two of them and then Will moans her name and she goes to him instead, their embrace mercifully shielded from view by one of Will’s giant arms. Fitz suddenly understands the expression "heartache", because there feels like a hole in a chest, one that's never going to heal.

It’s only after, after Fitz is clean and warm and in his own bed, wrung out after allowing a few tears in the shower that he hears her knock. He’s tempted to ignore it (but he’s never ignored her before and he realizes he can’t, he just can’t). He settles on opening the door a crack, but it never occurs to her to not enter his room. 

He stays ramrod still while she embraces him, kissing him on the neck. She pulls away, a question in her eyes when she notices that he stays completely motionless. He hears his voice say in the most perfectly detached and cordial manner “If you’re here to thank me, it’s unnecessary, I was just doing my job as your friend and as an agent.”

“As my friend?” she says with shock then repeats with disbelief; she shakes her head incredulously “As my friend!? Stop that, look at me. We have to talk”

He won’t look at her but instead holds up his hand to beg her silence and he’s distressed to hear his voice crack, “Does any part of you have any affection for me Jemma? If you love me even a little, you’ll stay away from me.”

When he looks up she looks as if she’s been slapped and for some perverse reason he can’t stop, “You have the love of your life, healthy and seemingly whole with you. I have nothing, and the only way I’m going to be able to survive this is to move past you, us, whatever. I have to let you go.” 

“No Fitz, it isn’t like that” she says shaking her head vehemently

He doesn’t let her finish, he grabs both her hands and repeats his plea. When he places a kiss on her forehead, her eyes well up with tears. She emits a silent sob, almost breaks with the finality of it. She wraps her arms around him as if she won’t ever let him go, and it feels like the bottom of the ocean 2.0. 

When he finally untangles himself and sets her outside his door, he can’t resist a final chaste kiss on her lips before shutting the door lightly in her face. He sinks to the floor and buries his face in his hands.

It’s the last time they really talk about anything other than science again, with the exception of Fitz giving her an occasional message from his mother. Seeing her smile makes him feel full of a sudden and powerful regret; maybe a ¼ of her love is better than none at all. But he wills himself to stay strong. 

Being the only two ‘real’ scientists on the base prohibits them totally isolating themselves (to be fair, she initially balks at their workplace isolation, but she gives him his space when he begs for it). For the most part they now work separately, only meeting when one has a particularly large breakthrough or when Coulson asks them to expedite a special project. 

Socially, their interactions become stilted. Mercifully, Jemma and Will keep to themselves. Will seems to follow her everywhere at first, his rugged handsomeness making him seem less needy. Fitz still feels Jemma’s eyes on him constantly but coward that he is, he avoids her and Will to the best of his abilities. The team appears to be in silent collusion with him, and Fitz never seems to want for company. Sometimes he feels bad that even Skye spends more time with him now than Jemma, but fuck Jemma is the one who moved on, he should at least get to keep the friends after the break-up.

Everything changes when he gets sick.

He’s never been a particularly hardy individual (Jemma always blamed his relative isolation as a child for his absence of viral antibodies) so it isn’t surprising to Fitz when he begins to sniffle working in the lab. It’s far enough from his sojourn to an alien world that he isn’t particularly concerned that it is an extra-terrestrial virus (it helps that he remembers Hunter coughing on the video game controller before handing it to him last week).

But unlike nearly every time Fitz has been sick in recent memory, there is no one there to bring him tea, or make him soup. Not that Jemma wouldn’t if he’d let her. She looks stricken when he seems to be hacking up a lung across the mess hall. Her usual fraught look of resignation, sadness and appeasement developing a new element- worry. And like he has ever since that day two months prior when he brought her space boyfriend home to Earth, he returns her look with a nod and half smile before he looks away. 

So when he gets worse he doesn’t go to her room as he usually does. Instead they exchange glances, hers filled with concern, his full of with reassurance and nonchalance. She doesn’t seem to buy it so he’s not surprised to find a covered dish of chicken soup, a box of his favorite tea and some medicinal honey on his workbench one morning. 

It’s when he doesn’t seem to be getting better that Jemma finally seems unable to bear the separation a minute longer, she enters his room and after feeling his burning forehead she marches him down to the infirmary. It seems as if she is intent on treating him herself, but when they get there, even though it kills him, Fitz gently shrugs off her arm and tells her to go to bed. She seems like she wants to fight to stay, but she finally turns, utterly dejected, and goes. 

It isn’t until he lays down that he notices the girl in the white coat. 

Despite the Jemma induced turmoil and his fever, he almost blurts out that he didn’t realize they made nurses so pretty. 

He’s eternally grateful for not saying such a ridiculous thing when she introduces herself as Dr. Nina Singh. He does blurt out that she seems incredibly young. She responds that she’s plenty old enough to know what she’s doing, but she says it with a smile so sweet that he can’t help but return it. 

He watches her as she examines him, her skin a light gold that contrasts beautifully with the shiny auburn of her hair. She has a dimple in her cheek, and a tiny mole beneath her left eye. He suddenly understands the expression ‘beauty mark’. 

After she looks him over and listens to his lungs she takes an x ray and makes a phone call. When she replaces the cradle, she worries her lip and says it’s just as she suspected, pneumonia. He’ll be spending the night in the infirmary with IV antibiotics. 

She seems perfectly at leisure to chat with him as he falls asleep, and despite his fatigue she’s blessedly easy to talk to. 

Fitz is surprised to see her still there when awakens the next morning, feeling slightly better than before. It turns out that she’s new and terribly bored and rather lonely. 

Nina laughs when he asks how she ended up here, and answers simply “adventure” with a quirk of a perfectly delicious eyebrow. She admits that the job is much less glamorous, and a heck of a lot less busy than she envisioned. She thinks it’s because everyone seems to be rather stoic about their injuries and have a rather alarming propensity to patch each other up.

She tells him nonchalantly that his girlfriend stopped by to check on him when he was asleep but she seems to brighten at Fitz’s admission that he’s actually very, very single. From there the conversation drifts to the past, and it turns out that she is about as young as she looks, a year younger than him even, and probably just as brilliant. She’s from all over, literally. Her journalist Indian father having met her Latvian philanthropist mother while they were both living in Uganda before living in Singapore, Bangkok, Vancouver and then finally Michigan. Nina laughs when she tells him that her parents were rather disappointed when she chose a career as prosaic and conventional as medicine, but paradoxically concerned when she chose to defer a fellowship for a year and work at S.H.I.E.L.D. instead. 

Fitz finds himself spilling out his own personal history as well, omitting the Jemma bits and instead telling Nina of life before. And as he’s speaking he realizes that he does indeed have a life separate from Jemma after all. 

The realization cracks the ice around his heart, a bit, just a bit. If he had a life before Jemma, maybe he could have one after Jemma too.

After another nap Nina deems him well enough to return to his room and gives him a bag full of pills and strict instructions to return tomorrow for a follow-up. His first instinct (and second and third) is to smile and retreat to his room, but some force more powerful than his fear (regret, remorse) moves him to ask her if she has plans for dinner tomorrow and if not would she like to eat with him. 

The smile on Nina’s face is electric, and he can’t help but return it. He ducks his head shyly as she says “it’s a date”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And they drift back together....
> 
> Not beta-ed, all mistakes are my own....

The first time he kisses Nina, it’s almost by mistake. He aims for her cheek, and when she turns it lands on the corner of her mouth. She reaches up and places her lips against his. He realizes that he’s more of a dolt than he ever thought himself to be. He draws her close and loses himself in the softness of her (forget, forget). When he draws back he feels the need to not be such a heel, and kisses her again, this time for herself. They’re both grinning like idiots when they come up for air. He realizes from her unpracticed kisses, that’s she’s a bit of a novice at this too. The thought is infinitely reassuring. 

Nina becomes a fast favorite with the group, Daisy takes to her immediately. Nina seems to share in her love of bad jokes and irreverent humor and even Hunter seems to adore her sarcasm. Bobbi seems a tad reserved at first, at least until they find out that they have a rather frightening amount in common, graduating from the same prestigious high school. 

Fitz feels almost inordinately proud of the fact that they’re together, it’s lovely to be with someone who he likes, who everyone likes (almost everyone, May still remains weary and Jemma keeps her distance). Nina even gets along with Will. They’re both fans of the same American football team and he chuckles when he finds them, feet up watching a game on the telly. Will seems more relaxed with her than anyone else on the base, and although Fitz should resent him, he finds that he can’t. The poor man literally spent 14 years in hell. 

Life is better than Fitz feels he has any right for it to be (if only, God if only) and he feels almost, almost ready to work with Jemma again (he’s scientist enough to know he works at least ten times better with her than without). So when she knocks shyly on the door of his lab to ask a question, he engages her gently on what she’s working on and feels a complete louse when she seems thrilled to the point of tears to tell him. For a few moments it’s like the past few years float away like grayish memories, and its Fitzsimmons once more. But then the science ends and she stands awkwardly, as if she desperately wants to stay but doesn’t want to ask. He holds up a finger and brings her back a cup of tea. She accepts it, her eyes gleaming. 

They don’t go back immediately to the way things were of course, but gradually she spends more time with him in the lab. He fears Nina might mind, but of course she sunnily reassures him that of course he should, Jemma was his friend first. By now Nina spends enough time in his room that she jokes that she should put her room up for rent on the internet as a ‘spy immersive experience.’ 

They’re happy enough together that he forgets Nina will be gone in a few months when he finds her searching for housing in Boston. When he does, his heart selfishly clenches in fear. He loves her for who she is, but also for the shield against the darkness that she’s become. He tells her lightly, with the ghost of a smile, that he has begun to dread the day she leaves. She seems to appraise him critically for once. Her trademark grin nowhere to be seen when she asks if he really will miss her. He can only enfold her in his arms and assure yes, of course, of course he will. She sighs and says that she’s almost tempted to stay, almost. But Harvard is waiting. She looks up at him and tells him, half-jokingly, that there are several excellent engineering institutions in Boston that might benefit from his genius. She must read something in his eyes because in the next breath she assures him of course she’s joking, his life and his work is here. Coward that he is, he feels inordinately relieved that he doesn’t have to confront the real reason he won’t (can’t) leave. 

It’s a month or so later (almost a year since Will) when he and Jemma are chatting in the lab that Fitz idly brings up how much he’s dreading Nina’s departure. Jemma’s hand stills and he realizes it’s the first time either of them have brought up their romantic lives. Fitz can tell that Jemma’s struggling to maintain her equanimity when she asks in a strained voice if he plans on leaving too. Fitz feels irrationally furious at Jemma, how dare she care if he comes or goes or stays or shoots off to the bloody moon, she didn’t choose him, she chose someone else. In a rare (and immediately regretted) rush of impetuosity and pettiness, he breezily replies that he hasn’t yet decided. 

Jemma swallows deeply, and says of course she understands. She wants more than anything, anything, anything for him to be happy. Her smile is watery as she looks up at him and Fitz knows she still feels heartbroken over hurting him. He assures her that he is happy, terribly so. The past, is the past etc… She shakes her head in acquiescence and says of course, of course and nods. Neither of them mention that her eyes are rimmed in red for the rest of the day.


	3. Chapter 3

Things always seem to change in the sick bay. 

It’s after Jemma is shot in the leg in a routine mission gone awry (all because she refused to leave behind the new phase array gun that they had built together) that Fitz seems to go to pieces. He finally faces what he’s managed to suppress all this time- She’s everything, she always was. The thought of losing her again makes him physically ill. 

So he waits until he sees Will come to the mess hall before he goes down to the sick bay. Jemma is the only one in the room and it’s so quiet that he hears his footsteps echo softly against the linoleum. Her hair is spread about her head in an auburn fan and her eyes are closed. She is wan and paler than usual against the sheets. He remembers how much blood she lost in the field and he goes cold. 

He sits next to her and he carefully takes her hand. At his touch her eyes fly open, full of the awful knowledge only the two of them share. Fitz stares at her, for the first time in months letting himself really look at her.  
“You’re a bloody idiot you know” he says softly, turning over her hand gently in his.

“You worked so hard on the central multiplying…” she bristles, her eyes flashing

“It was a machine…” he finishes, his voice going up just a notch

“That we built together! And the vibranium alloy was so precious…” she counters

“Jemma. You can’t do that, you can’t” He says his voice so quiet that she feels it vibrate through her rather than hear him.

She is instantly contrite when she sees the fear in his eyes, and she seems to deflate at the sight of his trembling mouth, “I’m sorry”

“If you ever do anything so stupid again, if you get yourself killed! I swear… I swear…” he clenches her hand as he speaks, his aphasia returning at his heightened emotional state

“You’ll kill yourself and pester me till the end of time” she says with the half smile of recollecting one of his long ago made threats. After a pregnant pause where millions of words are said and unsaid, she whispers, “Doesn’t sound half bad,” her eyes shining as her hand slips out of his and reaches up to cup his jaw and gently caress his face.

He suppresses a groan at her touch, and he reaches up to cover her hand with his own. He presses her hand against his face and turns into her palm, kissing it softly as he squeezes his eyes shut. They stay like this for a moment, an hour, maybe a lifetime. 

He finally drops his hand, “I have to go, I have to debrief with Coulson”

She nods her head in understanding and gradually withdraws her hand. She watches him as he turns and leaves before collapsing against her bed in tears.

From the anteroom, Nina watches.

She had stepped out to get a vicryl suture, and stayed in the observation room, loathe to disturb the touching tableu before her. She feels like she should be furious, her boyfriend behaving in such manner with another woman. Instead Nina feels disoriented and out of place, as if she had suddenly come into a movie that was half way through. Her characteristic smile is nowhere to be seen, and suddenly she feels far older than her 25 years. 

She feels a large, warm hand cup her shoulder and she looks up and sees Will, his face a mirror of hers. They wait in silence and it’s only after Fitz leaves that Nina releases the breath that she was holding, “forewarned is forearmed” she mumbles.

Will tells her he is sorry. Nina assures him that Fitz had been forthcoming enough initially in their relationship that she knew how much lay unresolved between him and Jemma. She tells Will that while Jemma was watching Fitz, she was watching Jemma. Nina realizes how hurtful this must be to Will so she reaches up to the hand on her shoulder and gives it a squeeze. 

Will smiles in a way that doesn’t reach his eyes and tells Nina of Jemma’s first days with him, how she had been so obviously, devastatingly in love with Fitz and how Will had fought that knowledge when he had first returned to Earth. He tells her that he had needed Jemma both on the blue planet, and here on Earth where she was the only connection he had left. Yet it wasn’t fair to Jemma to place that burden on her, it wasn’t fair to Fitz to lose her, and it wasn’t fair to himself or to Nina to be in the resultant one sided love affairs. 

Nina tells him he’s still young enough to have a half a dozen love affairs, a smile (just the slightest bit watery) quirking the side of her mouth. Will watches their reflection in the mirror and he can’t help but return her smile (her dimple is outrageously contagious after all) and as he squeezes her shoulder again he tells her maybe she’s right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one chapter left, thanks for reading :/


	4. Chapter 4

Fitz feels like the greatest Pratt to walk the Earth. 

Yesterday, had he been asked, he would have informed everyone that he was FINE. He had Nina, his work, his peers, his collaboration with Jemma (and maybe even half a friendship). He was over the worst of his broken heart, he was (almost) completely mended. 

That was of course before he almost lost her. 

Before he realized of course he isn’t over her. 

Of course he never will be. 

He resolves to tell Nina, because she deserves so much better (the best, the very best) and Nina shouldn’t settle for another minute with his pasty, cowardly self just because he’s too afraid to fight for the only thing he’s ever couldn’t live without.

When he finds her after his debriefing with Coulson, Nina is in her room, packing a box and listening to a softly crooning voice over a small speaker. She looks up at him and he isn’t sure how he knows that she knows, but he just does (maybe he’s gotten good at reading her too). She smiles a half smile and pats the bed next to her. She doesn’t turn towards him completely, but she does take his hand as she tells him meaningfully that she isn’t leaving, at least not for a few weeks, but that she felt like it was time to turn a corner. 

He exhales, and feels like a failure for having forced her to be the one to break it off. He wants to draw her into his arms as he apologizes, but he realizes he has lost that right. So he takes her hand in his and tugs her up gently so that she is forced to look at him as he apologizes. He tells her everything about Jemma, from the academy to their lab, to planes and viruses and missions, from the bottom of the ocean to Hydra to finding Jemma and then losing her again. Nina listens in silence and when he’s done she enfolds him in a hug. He tells Nina that he wishes he could love her like she deserves, but he can’t (when did he give his whole heart away to Jemma? He can’t even recall) and that she deserves the very, very best. 

Nina agrees with him with a laugh, and she tells him that she wouldn’t be much of a scientist if she hadn’t gotten all the dirt on him and Jemma’s relationship after Fitz had initially told her about them. She reassures him that she has had some time to shield her heart. 

Fitz relaxes visibly and drops his head into his hands. Nina rubs her hand across his back and thanks her lucky stars that she had known about Jemma all along, it would have been too easy to love Fitz to distraction otherwise.  
When he leaves he kisses both of Nina’s hands and tells her if she ever needs anything ever that he’s there and that he loves her. When Nina closes the door, she wills herself to think of Boston and new beginnings, of new adventures, new men and new friends. She knows she’ll be happy again of course, but she can’t help but rub the left of her chest and she knows Fitz has left a mark.  
\---------

Fitz doesn’t return to the sick bay again while Jemma convalesces, he couldn’t place Nina in that situation. Yet, he watches her on the security monitors while he works and he can’t help but notice Will’s absence. So Fitz isn’t entirely shocked when he sees Will waiting for him in his lab after dinner one day. 

Will is seated in the chair that he had sat in when Jemma had first told him of Will’s existence and the irony isn’t lost on him. He opens his mouth to tell that to Will when he abruptly cuts him off. Will tells him softly that that he wishes Fitz had been more of a bastard so he could have properly hated him. But after all it was Fitz who saved him from a fate worse than death, so there’s that. This causes them both to crack uneasy smiles. 

Will tells Fitz that he’s leaving, he’s had Coulson inform his family that he’s alive, and make up some story about him being held captive in a Russian prison. Will is going to try the impossible, to return from the dead.  
Seeing the look of horror in Fitz’s eyes, Will capitulates and tells Fitz that Jemma is staying. That when Will had asked her to come with him, she had cried and cried and told him that she couldn’t and that she was sorry, so very sorry. That even though she wasn’t with Fitz, she couldn’t live without him, not ever again.  
Fitz shakes his head in disbelief and tries to tell Will that he’s wrong. Will interrupts and asks what Jemma had said when Fitz had asked her to choose between the two of them, and for once Fitz is silent.  
Will barks an angry laugh and exclaims that he cannot believe that Fitz never asked her to choose. He tells Fitz that he’s an idiot, but so is Jemma in her own way and that he hopes Fitz and Jemma can finally be happy together, because it’s clear they won’t ever be without one another. That they deserve happiness. In response to Fitz’s continued stunned silence, Will thanks him again for saving his life and then he’s gone.

The room spins and Fitz returns to his bench, placing his hands flat against the table where he kissed her more than a year ago. He wonders how they can find their way back, after so much hurt and time. Then he remembers the look in her eyes when he kissed her hand a few days ago and he realizes failure isn’t an option. He has to fix this, for both of them.  
\-------

When Jemma is finally released to her room, she finds Fitz waiting. He’s brought her a beer they used to drink at Sci-Ops and there’s a peanut butter and honey sandwich (her favorite) waiting on her night table. She quirks a delighted smile at the sight.  
After settling her on her bed, three pillows propping up her back and a pillow under her foot, he putters around her room, shocked that he still knows where everything is and covers her with a warm blanket. She can’t stop watching him, can’t believe that he’s finally here.  
She feels like it’s a dream she’s dreamed so often that she’s afraid she’ll wake up. He settles at the foot of her bed and suddenly the silence is so thick that she can hear heartbeat. 

Fitz realizes there is nothing he can say now that there are finally no obstacles or barriers between them. For the first time, the cosmos is giving them a brief respite. He scoots himself onto the bed next to her in silence and enfolds her into his arms. 

She begins to cry and tell him that she’s so, so sorry. That this has been the worst, the very worst year of her life and she spent 6 months on alien planet after all. 

He kisses away all her tears and adds a few of his own. He cuts off her apologies with his own. He apologizes for being too scared to fight for her, for roping in poor Nina, for pushing Jemma away when she needed him. He squeezes her to him tightly, replete with the knowledge that he almost destroyed the most beautiful friendship he has ever known. He promises her that he’s done being scared. That the only thing he’s scared of now is ever being without Jemma again. 

She peppers his face with kisses and tells him she loves him, that she’s only ever been in love with him, that she can’t ever be without him again. He kisses her then and it’s like coming in from the snow to a warm fire, like spring sunshine after a gray morning. And although it starts gentle it soon turns frantic and Fitz has to pull away and tell her that she’s too fragile, that she needs to recover. She regretfully agrees but gently snakes her hand up the back of his shirt and kisses him lightly again, just because she finally, finally can. He splays his hand over her hip and kisses every freckle on her nose (like he might have wanted to for longer than he can recall) until she laughs in delight. 

They fall asleep entwined in one another, at least as much as they can be with Jemma’s leg propped on a pillow, the promise of tomorrow flickering like a hopeful beacon.


End file.
